Red tape throws monkey wrench into Milford Road project

Intricate, revised permit applications have delayed the start of the next phase of the Milford Road widening project by six months.

WAYNE WITKOWSKI

Intricate, revised permit applications have delayed the start of the next phase of the Milford Road widening project by six months.

Contracts are expected to be awarded in June, with construction starting in early August.

Lawmakers and representatives from agencies and companies partnering in the six-mile, $24.5 million project met Thursday at the Lehman Township Building.

The widening project will extend from Little Egypt Road north to three-tenths of a mile into Delaware Township, a few hundred feet beyond Log and Twig roads at a Pocono Mountain Lake Estates private community entrance.

It is expected to take three construction seasons.

"We're so far along the process, we're on the home stretch," said Kevin James, technical manager-highways for consulting engineering company Michael Baker Jr. Inc., which is overseeing the project for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

The National Park Service was invited and did not attend, and the state Department of Environmental Protection was not invited but will be notified about monthly update meetings, said Lehman Township Board of Supervisors Chairman John Sivick.

Called Project 402, plans began taking shape in 2011 and it is mapped out in 198 pages of approved plans involving 81 acres.

It is the third of four phases of the road-widening project. The first phase started on the northern end from Milford borough to the Route 739 intersection. After that, Project 401 was completed in early fall under Leeward Construction. Contracts were expected to be awarded for the next phase in December, a date delayed by permitting issues.

Pike County Conservation District completed its review June 24 for submission to the DEP, which responded with 19 pages of recommendations and subsequent time-consuming modifications in the plan.

Conservation District Executive Director Sally Corrigan said an "adequate" review was completed in December for the DEP, which sent back a letter Jan. 11 on stormwater management issues.

Verizon and Blue Ridge will jointly carry lines of service on the poles as they are moved and the companies said they do not anticipate any holdup.

The previous project was split into two phases but this one needs three phases, which Forbes said comes from straightening many curves and greater use of landfill. All right-of-way property acquisitions are completed, James said.

Sivick said that traffic control from the previous project was and remains a "huge concern for residents" but James said there will be no lane closures needed during construction.

"It's two miles longer than the last project and there are different reviewers, different techniques involved since the last phase," James said. "The level of detail is different from what was on the other one. It got a lot more complicated for this section. We have the riparian buffer, which we did not have to deal with from the previous section in 2007 and 2008."

Debbie Noone, PennDOT assistant director of design, said buffers from high quality streams has complicated and delayed this part of the road-widening project.

"I'm very troubled it would take this long to go through a permitting process," Baker said. "We have to move forward and try to expedite approvals."

Brown said organizations communicating face-to-face saves time which, she said, saves money as things continue to rise in cost.